OUTRAGE ACROSS COUNTRY
Mitfords from Dagenham, east whilst reluctant to comment at

A.K. Chesterton London brought a giant papier- first, conceded that he had seen

Ordinary British racists have
been in shock for the last two weeks
over the BBC’s decision to allow
BLACK playwright Bonnie Greer
onto the panel of Question Time.
Thousands gathered at the BBC
studios in Shepherd’s Bush, many
bearing monkey-shaped placards;
others, dressed simply in white,
chose to carry burning crosses.

mâché model of the ship Empire
Windrush emblazoned with the
slogan “FUCK OFF BACK TO
JAMAICA!”

Greer “stealing from her own
complimentary goody-bag” before
recording took place. “She hasn’t got
a shred of dignity,” he added.

Ms. Greer’s appearance
has also sparked international
debate. Former Rhodesian Defence
Minister, the late P.K. van der Byl,
currently in London to promote
his autobiography Munt Hunter,
“I have a right not to hear said that he was “very sad that the
that evil woman’s ghetto-babble” BBC [he] grew up with and held in
said one masked protestor as he such high regard has made one of
tightened a noose on a nearby tree. the biggest mistakes in its proud
history.”
Whole families also
converged on Wood Lane. The
Presenter David Dimbleby,

If the police choose to take
the matter further, it won’t be the
playwright’s first run-in with the
law - in 1998 she was convicted of
stealing her surname from the noted
Australian feminazi Germanine
Greer.

A.K. Chesterton’s debut novel
‘Father Brown-Shirt’ is now out in

2 TheCheeseGrater November 2009

Down Your Union
Fees, cuts, racism, blueprints and boredom: The Cheese Grater looks into this
year’s Welcome General Meeting

Following much turbulence in recent years, UCL Union may finally be on the brink
of democracy, albeit one akin to
herding cats. This year’s Welcome General Meeting led to
the passing of several motions
but, like an outbreak of diarrhoea, left some exhausted and
saw others running quickly for
the door.
Thankfully, there was
no repeat of February’s AGM,
when hundreds of students were
left stranded outside after the
Bloomsbury theatre had reached
capacity (see CG 21). However,
last year’s policy that each Union society must send two delegates to general meetings still
applied – never mind that the
WGM fell during ‘Try’ fortnight, when societies were still
wooing potential members.

Still Josh...
The meeting began with a
slideshow, rock music and cries
of “get on with it”. After half an
hour of introductions, including
an even cheesier explanation of
Union democracy by “I’m still
Josh” Blacker, the meeting finally got round to dragging up last
year’s big argument: should the
Union refrain from condemning
or supporting either side of the
Israel/Gaza conflict?
The referendum held last
March had in fact already provided an answer – 833 ‘Yes’ to
700 ‘No’ – but failed to reach
the 10% quorum required for
referenda by UCLU Standing
Orders. As a result, the matter
was passed back to the WGM,
attended as it was by less than
2% of UCL students. With much
squabbling between factions and
the threat of a second round of
speeches, a move to the vote
was finally made, the result once
more a resounding ‘Yes’.
Some hope, then, that the
Union could start to focus on

more students poured out of the
room. Pi Newspaper has helpfully reported how these were
all medics disinterested in the
motions that followed. Indeed:
everyone else had left earlier on.
Pierre Deludet called quorum
and closed the meeting, so the
‘emergency’ motions that followed did not become policy.
Perhaps this was for the best
– one of the motions aimed to
erase a swathe of last year’s motions just to protect the General
Secretary’s role as Returning Officer for Union elections.

Minority Report

matters closer to home, such as
saving the medics’ sports team
and having UCL pay workers the London Living Wage.
Indeed, motions such as these
were voted for and became Union policy… but not without
the odd cringe-worthy moment.
For starters, the otherwise Socialist Stop the War types obviously deemed the London
Living Wage unimportant, as
they all buggered off once the
Israel matter was over, leaving
a patch of empty chairs directly
in front of the podium. (It has
since transpired that the Union
doesn’t care much about the
Living Wage either, and is only
now considering adjustments to
its bar staff ’s inadequate pay.)
The motion ‘For a United
Policy on Cuts and Fees’ confused voters who only agreed
with part of what was proposed,
leading the General Secretary
Pierre Deludet to advise them
to abstain. The result was a winning 98 abstentions, leading to
much cheering until Deludet
pointed out that the motion
would pass as, by definition, abstentions don’t count.

Particular mention should
be made of Clinical President
Amanda ‘Mandelson’ Smith,
who made no less than four
speeches that evening. One of
Smith’s motions supported the
NUS Blueprint’s graduate tax,
thus conflicting with the increasingly ironically-named ‘United
Policy on Cuts and Fees’. When
pushed, Mandy admitted that
she had been ‘too busy’ to read
the Blueprint and suffered the
evening’s only vote against.

...And Still Mandy
Next up was Smith’s motion to mark out the new Union bar as a replacement for the
medics’ Huntley Street, which
will likely be demolished in
2011. When asked who would
pay to rename the new bar ‘The
Huntley’, Smith replied ‘it’s just
a sign, it won’t cost much’. Indeed – the site of the new bar,
23 Gower Place, is a Grade II
listed building and cannot have
a fancy new sign slung on it,
thus making the cost to the Union very small indeed.
As the last normal motion
of the evening was passed, many

Last up was a motion from
Shawn Sherwin-Williams, the
Medical and Postgraduate Officer. During a training day run by a
contractor, the casually-dressed
MPO believed he was the victim
of racial discrimination when
he was mistaken for a cleaner.
The sabbatical officers rushed to
sever the contract, only to be advised that the company should
be given a chance to respond. A
mediation with the company the
day before the WGM did not
produce an admission of racism, leading the outraged MPO
to bring an emergency motion
demanding that the Union terminate the company’s contract
‘with immediate effect’.
Activities Officer James
Hodgson opposed the motion
on behalf of the other sabbs,
and has since been singled out
by the student media for stating,
in response to a query, that he
did not feel the incident to have
been racist. Sherwin-Williams’
motion was indicatively passed
by the minority of students remaining, but he still threatened
to call for an Extraordinary
General Meeting over the matter. A week later, the sabbs had
‘completed an internal investigation’ and decided not to offer any further contracts to the
company in question.
A.A.

Cuts Like A Knife

November 2009 TheCheeseGrater 3

Alex Ashman reviews the Provost’s latest slasher
Back in 2005, UCL Provost,
Professor Malcolm Grant went on
a mission to cut 15% of staff. The
resulting 167 redundancies left
College increasingly reliant upon
PhD students taking up the slack.
Now the Provost is looking to be
even more ‘prudent’ with the budget.
This time, planned spending cuts of
6% threaten a ‘reduction in head
count’ of up to 400 jobs.
Official discussion about the
cuts began in January this year. Ever
keen to skirt around employment
law, UCL failed to inform the staff
trade union, University and College
Union, until May. What, though, is
this dire situation that our College is
in? A quick look at the figures shows
that rather than suffering from cuts,
UCL has practically been inviting
them.
Back in May, when the 6%
cuts were first proposed, UCL was
looking to receive an increase in

government funding from the Higher
Education Funding Council for
England, a body on which Malcolm
Grant happens to sit. However,
College’s Head of Finance predicted
that this would soon become a small
decrease in funding – and so it did.
How, though, does this 2% drop
in funding explain a call for 6%
cuts? Well, the Provost reckons that
next year will see a further decrease
in funding of 10% and is planning
UCL’s staff reductions in advance.
In other words, the man who sits
on the board of the funding council
is inviting cuts at his own institution.
After all, Grant has long
made it clear that he is firmly on
the taxpayer’s side when it comes
to university funding, and would
rather see uncapped tuition fees (see
CG 12). If the 6% cuts go ahead,
they will almost certainly be just the
beginning – in fact, Grant now looks
to form a Redundancy Committee,
which would allow compulsory

redundancies to begin. This would
be the nuclear option for UCL, and
would lead to a damaging fight with
the unions.
A little history would help
here. Back in 2005/06, the Provost’s
‘Regeneration Plan’ aimed to cut
15% of staff in order to correct
a deficit that equated to 1.5% of
UCL’s turnover (see CG 7). This
led to a “terror campaign” by senior
management to force academics
into voluntary redundancy or early
retirement. As one senior UCU
member puts it, “they shook the
tree to see who would fall out”.
Though staff refused to go quietly,
causing a stalemate that prevented
College from making compulsory
redundancies, the damage had been
done.
With academics increasingly
using their time to apply for research
funding in order to combat funding
shortfalls, UCL has replaced

the redundant lecturers with
Postgraduate Teaching Assistants. As
pointed out in the last issue, PGTAs
are often overworked, underpaid,
under-represented and simply not as
experienced as the lecturers they are
replacing. Meanwhile, the research
funding gained by academics is being
diverted elsewhere, leaving UCL’s
largest faculties continually in the
red. Combine this with the historical
expense of combining UCL Medical
School with the Royal Free and the
Middlesex; and the result is a 10%
cut to Life Sciences.
While Grant has long hoped
that market forces will drive up
tuition fees, he is leaving students
with a budget education, where
all the expensive professors have
been cut to save the embarrassment
of asking for taxpayers’ money.
Regardless of the reassurances made
by UCL Union’s Education Officer,
any further cuts will surely result in
further damage to “the world’s 4th
best university”.

Gates Installed At UCL
UCL’s quick-fix Microsoft contract has shored up some gaping holes in college
Alex Ashman
Under-funded and neglected
for years, UCL’s email and
calendaring services have been
pushed to the point that they
are “either failing, or in danger
of failing”, and are “increasingly
difficult and expensive to maintain”.
William Henry Gates III
Rather than invest £1 million in a
1989:
Arrested for drunk driving
new in-house system, College is now
2009:
Supplies
UCL email system
looking to make short-term savings
by outsourcing to Microsoft, who contents of inboxes and calendars
have offered three years’ service for are currently stored in Ireland, but
free. But just how good an offer is could be moved to any country
this, and how risky is it for UCL to within the European Economic
place its trust in the virtual monopoly Area on a whim. Any files uploaded
that is Microsoft?
onto the ‘Live Spaces’ and ‘Skydrive’
provided as part of Live@UCL are
The ‘free’ service, known as not guaranteed to be secure and are
Live@UCL, provides a Hotmail- stored in the United States, beyond
style email account and Outlook the reaches of the Data Protection Act.
calendaring. It is under the direct
control of Microsoft, so any
Interestingly, one motivation
problems will have to be dealt with for UCL to outsource is that it
via the company’s own staff. The would prefer to have all staff

actively use the same calendaring
service – that way, College can
report to the Home Office that it is
‘tracking and monitoring’ non-EU
staff according to immigration law.
While most staff who currently use
calendaring prefer Oracle Calendar,
the outsourcing means they will
all be forced to move to Outlook.
And what of the deal itself?
Microsoft is well known for ‘endloading’ contracts by providing a
‘free’ service and then charging once
the customer is hooked. While UCL
claims that Microsoft’s commercial
rates are comparable to the cost
of running in-house email and
calendaring services, the potential
charges once the honeymoon is over
are as yet unknown.
So what if Microsoft does
start charging? Surely UCL can
just take everything back in-house?
Unfortunately, migrating from one

email system to another would cost
UCL around £250,000 – this would
be the penalty for terminating the
contract with Microsoft. Combine
this with the inevitable drain of inhouse knowledge once the service
is outsourced, and UCL is liable to
stick with the contract regardless.

No Such Thing As
A Free Launch
The deal is in fact a coup
for Microsoft. Not only has the
company been given carte blanche
when it comes to charging for the
service in three years’ time, but UCL
will become dependent on Microsoft
software regardless of whether the
contract continues. Furthermore,
UCL will act as an advertisement
for other universities, helping
Microsoft to forge ahead with a
new monopoly. It is telling that
Cambridge University, when offered
a free service not for three years but
‘for life’, turned Microsoft down.

4 TheCheeseGrater November 2009

Anatomy Blackout
How incompetence and a dodgy transformer ended classes, destroyed
research and almost killed a lot of fish
Anne C. Wolfes
On Thursday, 15th October,
London’s “Global University”
provided a taste of life on the receiving
end of the Iraqi National Grid. The
electricity supply to most of UCL’s
Anatomy Building, Medical Sciences
Building, and Darwin Building was
cut off for six hours, owing to a
faulty transformer on the verge of
exploding.
Despite the severity of the
situation, UCL staff were only warned
five minutes prior to the cutoff, at
around 5pm – two hours after the
initial decision for the large-scale
shutdown had been made. This late
notice meant that many researchers
had to interrupt and discard their
experiments. Within the affected
buildings, expensive equipment was
put at risk. Indeed, a laser, worth

around £100,000, was damaged due
to the sudden disconnection.
Moreover, one of the world’s
largest zebrafish laboratories - holding
around 30,000 of the creatures
- was affected by the electricity
outage. Whilst this primarily brings
up matters of animal welfare, it is
also worth noting that the fish are
fundamental to many world-class
research projects at UCL.

(Associate Dean of the Division
of Biosciences) has said that the
installation of an uninterrupted
power supply for valuable equipment
is planned in the future. However, it is
shocking that such measures were not

already in place, owing to a similar
incident a number of years ago. On
that occasion, a loss of power to
fridges and freezers caused expensive
lab material to defrost, with massive
financial implications.

A laser worth around
£100,000 was damaged
An
external
emergency
generator (the large noisy container
opposite the Science Library) was
only put in place after a two-and-ahalf hour hiatus.
Professor

John

Carroll

Zebrafish: dead in the water... almost

Spotted: Shit Journalism

Society Bitch
Economics and Finance Society got
off to a bad start this year, when they stole
a commercial stall at the Fayre. They then
proceeded to spend £500 on sushi and a
Mahiki Treasure Chest... for their committee.
Jazz Society had a special moment after
they ‘accidentally’ bought a piano on eBay for
£1. They then paid £60 for it to be transported
to London, only to have to throw it in a skip,
since they had nowhere to put it.
The Men’s Rugby Club have been at
it again in the bars. They broke the windows
open in the Second Floor Bar so that they
could throw pitchers of vomit and piss out
onto the street. Classy as ever.
The newly formed Albanian Society
have had a flying start to the term. They
managed the superb achievement of gaining 1
member during Join Fortnight.

More Obama Success!
Following the People’s President’s bonanza in the Nobel
Prizes this autumn, Lyle Somerset takes a look at more of
Obama’s latest achievements

Oh dear. It seems London Student has taken a
leaf out of Pi’s book, by firing all of its sub-editors.
• Obama was recently nominated for a
In its issue of the 19th October 2009, the article
Guardian Student Media Award, because
‘Big Student Supermarket Sweep’ (p5) carried
the illuminating strapline ‘Something something
everybody is nowadays.
demionstrates [sic] solidarity with Palestine’.

• From NOBOs to MOBOs, the funky
president won both Newcomer of the Year
and the Lifetime Achievement award.
• After a frankly delicious ‘brace of American
birds’ served at his inauguration supper,
Obama has earned his first Michelin Star
• Obama is now the host city of the 2016
Olympic games.
• Obama is now the world’s fourth best
university. Yes we can!

Each week, the former President of Republika Srpska shares some of his
favorite Serbian poetry with us, from his prison cell in the Hague.
This week, I have decided to include great poem
by great man, great friend of mine General Ratko
Mladić. I must be saying this particular piece, in noted
Serbian poetical form the Ljíméryck, speaks to my
heart about great troubles we suffer in Yugoslavia. Let
nobody say after their reading of her that we are not a
peoples of great culture.

Lord Stern of Brentford
bursts into the smoking room
of his club like a premature
ejaculation, and shouts his almost
trademark “Let’s fucking change
some climate!”

I ask whether he has just
admitted to fabricating all of the
above.

He greets me warmly and
apologises for the absence of his
wife, who couldn’t join us owing
to her “working overtime at the
Kingsnorth power station. Fucking
protesters are back, apparently.”
“Can’t they just leave out the
activism shit, and get on with their
lives?” he barks, downing his glass
of cognac.
I am, as ever, startled by
his frankness. “Honestly, it’s not
like anyone really believes what
they say anymore anyway. Take

It had its chance.
me, for example. You know that
thing a couple of weeks ago about
the future of the planet resting
on people giving up meat? What
a load of bullshit. Just wanted to
sneak onto the front pages before
all the Copenhagen bollocks. I’ve
got a mortgage to pay, you know?”

“Worse,” he responds, “I
spent all night trawling through
the
incoherent
ramblings
on climateprogress.org, and
masturbating to the pictures
of emaciated children, until I
found something that no-one
could possibly agree with – the
meat thing. If I wasn’t so fucking
wrecked right now, I probably
wouldn’t admit any of this, but
the wife and I are practically
carnivorous, and as everyone
knows, veg is for queers.”
“Does this penchant for
truth-bending stretch to your other
dire predictions?” I ask, feeling

more and more uncomfortable
with every second.
“Kind of. Most of it
probably will happen more or
less as reported, but no one ever
seems to ask me how I feel about
it. About the 5 degrees rise. Let me
tell you now, mano-a-mano, I’m
fucking jubilant. Who needs Africa
anyway? They had their chance,
and now the day of reckoning will
come, and those who have not
prepared will feel the full might of
the organic dildo that is Mother
Nature!”
At this point Lord Stern
passed out.
Lord Stern is IG Patel Chair at the
London School of Economics

6 TheCheeseGrater November 2009

A Striker Speaks Out
Postman Pat talks to The Cheese Grater’s Sean Gittins
‘Not since the mid-1980’s have
I seen clashes between workers
and management like it - it’s really
serious!’ exclaims Patrick Clifton,
a.k.a. Postman Pat.

biased in their representation of the
story, making it out as if we, the
workers, want to strike, that we are
dinosaurs of a bygone age and we
should move with the markets. Well,
why don’t they move with this?’ Pat
says, sticking his middle finger up at
a group of nearby reporters.

The Cheese Grater recently caught
up with Pat to see what he thought
about the dispute between the Postal
Workers’ Union, Communication
Workers’ Union (CWU) and Royal
Mail’s management, headed by
Adam Crozier.
Adorned in a ‘modernised’ Royal
Mail outfit comprising navy shorts
and a jacket, white socks decorated
with the Royal Mail cypher, brown
Birkenstocks and the famed skyblue Royal Mail shirt, Pat takes a
long and thoughtful wheeze from
his fourteenth Woodbine. His
faithful cat Jess, thirty years old in
2011 (making Jess around 130 in
cat years), purrs melifluously as she
nestles in Pat’s crotch.
I ask him what he thinks of the
management’s
demands
that
workers be open to modernisation.
His response is vitriolic. ‘We have
modernised! We’ve taken a pay
cut, taken on private firms such as
TNT for which we deliver and they
cream the profit off the top and, on
top of it all, we, the workers, have

I ask him what he thinks of Adam
Crozier. The mention of his name
brings a raging hiss from Jess. ‘That
cunt and his three-million-plus per
year salary!’ spits Pat, ‘I would piss
on him if he were on fire - but only
enough so that the fire didn’t go out
and he knew I was
pissing on him while he was on fire.’

been trying to get management to
use the Advisory Conciliation and
Arbitration Service. But they refuse that just shows you who’s asking for
a strike, doesn’t it?’

At this point, the familiar
Postmistress, Mrs. Goggins, walks
in with coffee and a plate of biscuits.
‘Digestives, custard creams and rich
teas again, pet,’ she says, winking at
me.‘I’ll not have bourbon creams
in my biscuit tin, if you know what
I mean.’ She turns to leave on this
enigmatic note. ‘Thanks, love,’ says
Pat to Mrs. Goggins, giving her rear
an ample squeeze as she wanders off
with a teapot.

Pat takes a moment to wipe some
saliva from his bottom lip and adjust
his trademark horn-rimmed glasses.
‘The media are almost completely

In between dips of biscuit into his
coffee, Pat pontificates some more,
‘You know, from the 1970’s through
to the 1990’s the Royal Mail was

“And where are these going?”
Pat asked his cat. She mewled
quietly. “That’s right, Jess” said
Pat, “I’m going to shove them
up Peter Mandelson’s cock.”

the most profitable postal delivery
service in the world! You don’t see
that mentioned in the media do
you? And the Union bosses begged
the Labour and Tory governments
to stop siphoning off the profits and
to reinvest that cash in a Royal Mail
modernisation, but would they do
it?’ He slams his hand down on the
table, giving me a jolt. ‘Would they
my arse!’
Pat mentions that in recent years
he has been forced to work not
only as a Postman, but also in the
Special Delivery Service (SDS). ‘In
keeping with “modernisation” I’ve
had to work in the SDS to keep my
job, travelling between Greendale,
Ingledale and Pencaster on a daily
commute! I’m almost sixty years old,
I can’t keep up the pace.’
As he finishes his sentence, Pat bends
forward and lets out a heavy wheeze,
clutching his left arm. For a moment
I fear the worst, but he soon regains
his composure.
I end with a question about Lord
Mandelson. What does Pat think
about Mandelson’s comment that
he is ‘beyond anger’ at the prospect
of a workers’ strike? ‘He can go fuck
himself, and we all know he probably
does anyway.’

Grater Restaurant Review
W. R. Glenfiddich tackles a few bottles of research
Reader, you find me: W.R.G., your ever-faithful
restarauntee, utterly indisposed at a table in the
fashionable Huguenots Brasserie, West Kensington
- newly opened by Hugo Smedley, a chum from
my alma mater Rawley House (come on you
Robins). My table is littered with the remnants
of several vases of wine, a few pints of port, at
least one barrel of Bolly and a bath of sherry. I
shout noisily to the waiter that my tarte au citron
“looks like it’s covered in vom”. He points out
politely that it is, indeed, covered in vomit - my
own. Peering groggily over the table I notice that
my lady-friend for the evening seems to have left.
I vaguely recollect someone being awfully cross
with me, although that may have been the head
chef - on my way back from the toilets for a quick
chunder break I had taken a wrong turn and found
myself tangled in a metal, wiry thing that turned

out to be the main kitchen grill. At this point my
good friend Hugo - flanked by two wide, bald men
in black - presents me with a choice: paying and
leaving, or a punch in the head. I end up settling
for both options.
As I stumble back to my lodgings in Russell
Square, a little woozy with concussion, I reflect on
my Huguenots experience. The decor was blue which is good - and I had certainly had some food
- possibly beef, although it could well have been
seabass. I had undoubtedly had some drink (I am
beginning to suspect I am a tad tipsy). I tally up the
bill: £512 a head doesn’t sound right. It turns out
I’ve forgotten to add on the breakages, which push
it up to £865 each. A word to the wise, though - I
stuck to the set menu. If you go a la carte at these
places it can be bloody expensive.

9/10
Huguenots Brasserie, Chaps Street, West
Kensington, W14 1DC

November 2009 TheCheeseGrater 7

Drugs, children and the love that dare not speak its name...

MOIR: I KNOW
HOW WACKO
DIED
MAX HASTINGS

‘Lego Killed Stephen Gately’ - Page 10

that Gately had, in fact, died of
gay.

By Thomas Rhoades
Political Correspondent

FOLLOWING the sudden death
of former Boyzone member
Stephen Gately in Menorca last
month, there was only one woman
man enough to state the facts.
Using her razor-sharp reasoning
and intuition for all things perverse,
the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir revealed the
shocking truth to the informationhungry masses.
Looking past police reports and
the opinions of so-called ‘doctors’,
Moir was able to prove conclusively

But it would seem that the
fearless Moir, hailed by some as a
modern day Tiresian soothsayer an orgy oracle, if you will - is not
stopping at just one revelation.
Far from it, in fact, as this week
she has once again fearlessly gone
against the spectre of expert
opinion to spill the beans on the
passing of the King of Pop.
Ignoring
the
piles
of
meaningless facts and evidence
that the case has thrown up, Moir
presents an article which proves
inconclusively that Jackson,
rather than overdosing on
prescription medication, melted
in Macaulay Culkin’s mouth.
Turn to page 9

8 TheCheeseGrater November 2009

Garden Walls of the World
This week, Alan Titchmarsh crosses the Iron Curtain to visit Berlin
Berlin is home to one of the
great garden walls of the world. I
spoke to Mr. Erich Honecker, its
owner.
“Of course, I’ve only owned
the garden since 1971” he says to
me, smiling as he welcomes me into
the remarkable urban-horticultural
space that he affectionately calls
“the death strip”. “It was really
Herr Ulbricht, the previous owner
of the house, who did most of the
work in the early Sixties, turning
a mere barbed wire fence into a
concrete masterpiece complete with
watchtowers and searchlights”.
I realise as we wonder around
the hard landscaping, taking note
of the plantless, meticulously raked
earth, that Mr. Honecker is a very
modest man who cares deeply for
the “workers’ paradise” that he has
created. Indeed, his fastidious nature
is revealed when I ask about the

Moscow to give it to me!”
And yet, the local council
now seeks to pull down Erich’s wall.
“The change really came after the
council went Lib Dem in 1989,” he
grimaces, adding “but I’ve been on
to the National Trust, they reckon
it’s at least a Grade II red-star listed
structure; so once that goes through,
there’s fuck all the council can do.”

‘Hi Alan’, says Erich, patting me on the back.
graffiti on the other side of the wall.
“Ah yes, some bourgeois types
think it’s amusing to paint all kinds
of nasty things on the wall, but
Herr Mielke - the head of the local
Neighbourhood Watch - soon sees
to them.” There is suddenly fire in
his eyes. “Some people even try to
jump over it from time to time, like
that little shit from Goodbye Lenin,
but we make sure they never do it

into

I use the distraction to break
free of Erich’s grip, and make a run
for the relative safety of a house
on the corner of the street owned
by an American ex-pat, Charlie
Checkpoint...

SUDOKU

Liz Lecture
Queen thrusts
calamari class

again.”
I ask Erich about the
numerous awards he has won for
the garden and which is his favourite.
“Well of course it was wonderful to
get an honourary gold medal from
the Royal Horticultural Society meeting Camilla Parker-Bowles was
a great treat - but I must say that
the one I treasure most is the Greenfingered Stalinist Prize. Comrade
Brezhnev came all the way from

Erich’s tenacity is remarkable
for a man his age. I get up to leave,
and suddenly his hand is on my
forearm, crushing it in a vice-like grip.
“Why do you want to leave, Herr
Titchmarsh?” he asks forcefully. At
this point Mr. Mielke falls out of a
bush clutching a tape-recorder.

UCL

The Cheese Grater jumps on the latest
puzzle craze, just as you got bored of it

UCL’s Marine Biology students
were stunned this week when the
Queen and Prince Phillip wandered
into a lecture on squid.
Dumbstruck
undergraduates
watched as the monarch, casually
dressed in a hoodie and jeans,
shuffled her way along the back
row, apologising as students lifted
their knees to allow her royal
passage. At the end of the hour, she
and her racist husband received a
gracious round of applause.

Thrilled with her NVQ
years, the Queen has completed
diplomas in Queer Theory, IT
Management and Dutch.”

“This wasn’t a one-off” said a
palace aide, “Liz and Phil often pop
into London’s Global University
for a quick swot. In the last three

Pressed for comment, Prince Phillip
said “It’s our little bit of reality.
When you live in a fucking great
palace, it can be refreshing to spend
a day feeling fourth-rate.”

“The palace has never received any
complaints,” he added. “It’s just
their way of trying to live a normal
life.”

Tips & Tricks: Time yourself. Tell everybody how fast you are at Sudoku. Time how
long it takes them to stop caring. Compare the two times. Cry.